One of the main obstacles to testing hypotheses relating to labor and in particular white-collar labor is the difficulty of obtaining individual specific measures of input and output.
Email and other forms of inter-personal communications represent a valuable and pervasive means of business, social and technical exchange. These forms of communication can provide much data for research on communities and social networks. As a measure of collaboration, information proximity, and knowledge exchange, email and other forms of inter-personal communication that can be digitized and rendered into text afford the possibility of direct observation that has many advantages over traditional self-report survey methods. Despite the rich literature and rising interest among social scholars in studying these forms of communication, there are few tools that can help researchers actually gather these forms of communication and extract status cues while handling privacy concerns. The absence of such tools greatly limits research progress in many of the social sciences.